Off Page SEO

Off page SEO refers to the techniques that can be taken out side of a website,  to improve it’s position in  search engine results page (SERPs). Off-Page SEO includes not only link building but also social media promotion, bookmarking, etc. It also done with promotion works of a website. It is a best way to get more website traffic.

Before learning more about Off-Page SEO, we have to know little about SEO and it’s types.

SEO

SEO (search engine optimization) is a method of changing the rank of a web page or a website in search engine results using keywords or phrases. Search Engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc. It is an approach of techniques to increase the amount of visitors to a website. Two types of SEO:

• On Page SEO
• Off Page SEO

On Page SEO:

Here optimizing your website and making changes on title, meta tags, site structure, site content, solving canonicalization problem, managingrobots.txt etc. It provides good contents, keywords & putting them into correct places, giving appropriate title to all pages, etc.

Now back to our discussion, Off Page SEO.

We all are know Off Page SEO is important as much as On Page SEO. Then The Question is… Why Off Page SEO is important ?

When we search about anything on search engines, they give us the best results for our search. For getting this best results, search engines find a lot of techniques including on and off page seo. Through Off Page SEO, mainly we got back links. Each link is a reference for search engines about that site. It is more likely to have mentions on social media ( Facebook likes, tweets, Pins, +1’s etc. ) and it is more likely to be bookmarked and shared among communities of like-minded users. References means, a very good indication on how the World (other websites and users) value the particular website.

Off Page SEO have lots of benefits. Some of them are:

• Increase in Rankings : by getting more back links, website will rank higher position in SERPs. Through this website gets more traffic also.
• Increase in Page Ranks : Page Rank indicates the importance of a website in the eyes of Google.  We know that, Page Rank values between 0 – 10. That’s why Google gives more relevant results to the searcher.
• More Exposure : By getting higher ranks means great exposure. While getting in the top position (a website), it gets more links, more visits, more social media mentions, impressions, etc.

Now we can move to off page seo techniques.,

LINK BUILDING

It is a popular Off Page SEO method. We mainly build a link for getting a good position in search engines. Search engines like Google treats a link from another website to your site as a confidence. By making links from other sites, it means your site is trust worthy and Google considers it as a vote for your site. For example if someone likes this page and references it from his/her website or blog, then this is like telling search engines that this page has good information.

Link building is good, by getting Good Quality link is better for your site. Which means getting so many link from with or without trustworthy is not a good method. All links are not equal, One link from a high authority site is much better than many links from a bunch of low authority sites.

Try to avoid artificial link building methods, like buying and selling of links, use of automatic programmes to create links to your site, etc. These techniques are all considered as ‘Black Hat‘ method by Google, which will be punishable to your site.

Most popular link building methods are:

DIRECTORY SUBMISSION :

Now a days, submission of website to a directory is a common method in SEO. Purpose of directory submission is to get back links. It is purely based on how effectively we are selecting those directories and how efficiently we are choosing the category for submission. Submit your websites to the topmost quality directories like DMOZ, Yahoo Directory, etc.

Nowadays many web directories may offer paid listings but don’t go for it. That sites may not be trustworthy.

LINK BAITING :

Link Baiting is used to get many in-bound links pointed to your site. It is the practice of crafting content that is designed to get other content producers to link to it. Suppose you have copied/published another website’s news or content in your blog/website. Don’t forget to place their website link as a reference. Do it for others and, if your content is trustworthy, let others do it for you. This is another way to increase your link popularity.

Examples of link bait, include breaking news, striking images, controversy, humor, educational material and applications. If your content has value for readers, they are likely to share the link.

CROSS-LINKING :

Cross linking is the process of linking between two sites. (Sites may or may not be owned by the same person). It allows users to reference sites with content similar to that which they are already viewing, and may be of further interest to them. Link to internal pages within your site wherever necessary (Internal Linking).  Through this you can increase your link popularity. Which is another major factor of Google Page Rank algorithm.

Also try to get a content link from websites/blogs that are related to your site theme. Try getting a link from within their site content using a targeted keyword as anchor text. Very good example for Cross Linking is Wikipedia. These types of links have more weight from a search engine point of view.

LINK EXCHANGE :

Exchange links with service-related websites (this is commonly termed as Thematic Link Exchange) that can help increase your link popularity, which is a major factor of Google’s Page Rank algorithm. Beware of Black-Hats while doing exchanges. For example, I could link your website from mine and you could do the same.

ARTICLE DIRECTORIES :

An article directory is a website with collections of articles written about different subjects. By publishing your articles on an article directory you could get a link (or 2) back to your website. Some article directories accepted only unique content while other directories accepted anything from spin articles to already published articles. Sometimes article directories are referred to as content farms, which are websites created to produce mass content.

SEARCH ENGINE SUBMISSION :

Submit your website to the most popular search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista, Alexa, Alltheweb, Lycos, Excite, etc., to get listed for free.

FORUM SIGNATURES :

Many people where commenting on forums for the sole purpose of getting a link back to their website (they included the links in their signature). It is a great way to build back links for your site. Search for the forums that is suitable to your topic.

COMMENT LINK:

The same concept as forum signatures where you comment on some other website or blog in order to get a link back. Even worse, instead of using your real name you could use keywords so instead of writing ‘comment by safna’,  you wrote ‘comment by How to lose weight’ or anything similar. Try to comment on relevant website which is suitable to your website topic. Otherwise it will become black hat method.

BLACK HAT SEO

 Black hat SEO doesn’t obey search engine guidelines.  Its Techniques and SEO strategies focus only on search engines. That is, black hat seo doesn’t focus on human audience. Some examples of black hat SEO techniques include keyword stuffing, invisible text, doorway pages, adding unrelated keywords to the page content or page swapping (changing the webpage entirely after it has been ranked by search engines). Black hat SEO can possibly result in your Web site being banned from a search engine. Google has become very intelligent in recognizing black hat seo. With the introduction of Panda and Penguine they have managed to solve the problem and protect their search engine from spammers.

Some Techniques of Black Hat SEO :

• Cloaking: 

Here content presented to the user is entirely different from the content presented to Search Engine Spider.

• Duplicate Content :

It involves copying contents from one website and posting it on another website.

• Comment Spamming :
  

Some website owners leave poor comments on every blog post or any other area which will get a link back to their website. We are already said about how to get a back link through comment.

• Link Spam :

A way of getting link to the site from unrelated and low quality sites. Link building is an easy way to manipulate the search engine algorithm and many spammers take the advantage of this by building link network which leads to the creation of black hat seo.

• Article Submission :

Submit contents to many article directories which is low quality.

• Directory Submission :

Paying to submit your website to thousands of low quality directories.

• Hidden Text :

Creating text or links which is the same color of the background of the site.

• Keyword Stuffing :

It involves overloading a page with keywords beyond what might be expected for meaningful content.

Disadvantages of Black Hat SEO –

1. If Google detects website of link spamming, link farming, keyword stuffing, or any other illegal activities, it can ban your website from their search portal.
2. Temporary high ranking switches to low ranking.
3. Quality of the website goes bad.
4. Permanently banned from search engines.

Difference Between Black Hat SEO and White Hat SEO

To “FOLLOW” or “NOFOLLOW”

Nofollow is an attribute that can be added to links to discourage Comment Spam. Webmasters gives a way to link to a website without passing any ‘link juice’ (for example in the case of ads), search engines introduced what is known as the “nofollow” link. This is a special tag you can add to a link. Example: <a href=http://www.anysite.com rel=”nofollow”>Any Site</a>) that tells search engines not to count the particular link as a ‘vote’ to the referenced website. Now you can link other websites from yours without taking the risk of being caught for selling or exchanging links.

Now we have to know ‘what is a good link’?

First you should understand that link building is not only focused for quantity but for quality too. In other words it doesn’t matter how many links are pointing to your website but it is more important from where these links are coming. For example a link from a normal blog does not have the same weight as a link from New York Times or a link from Matt Cutts blog (head of Google Quality team) is not the same as a link from my blog.

SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media is part of ‘off-site SEO’ and it’s also a form of link building. It should be noted that almost all of the links you get from social media sites are “nofollow” but this does not mean that they do not have any value. Try to become a member of the most popular social networking sites like Twitter, Myspace, Facebook, Linked In, Ecademy, etc., and create a profile of your own. By doing this you can extend your network online, get connect with your friends, share things with each other, and promote your company/website to build an online reputation. You have to show your active participation on a regular basis. When you get involved with social networking sites you are stepping away from your website and putting your self into internet’s vast community. It gives more opportunity to interact with customers, etc. Likes and Shares also boost the visibility of your site.

• Add a TWITTER button to your website, so that visitors are able to tweet your content and share it with their followers. Create your own Twitter account and notify your followers about interesting contents, product updates, etc. In Tweets use hash tag with keywords easily found in Twitter Search.
• Facebook may have good impact on your rankings. Add a Facebook Like Button to your website. Create a Facebook page and engage your readers in sharing and discussing your post, photos and videos.

• Make sure your website has a Google+ page and make sure you’re sharing your content via this. It’s very likely that Google uses its own social channel as a signified for ranking content higher when it’s shared via the channel and achieved a certain number of +1s. If you take time to grow your audience on Google+ it will simply increase the possibility of +1s and therefore strengthen that signal.
• etc .

BLOGGING

This is one of the most powerful ways to promote your company/website online. Write a blog of your own for your company/website and include lots of unique content. Be precise in what you’re trying to convey for the users in your blog entry and promote your blog in blog directories and blog search engines.

You can also promote your blog/website by posting comments in other service-related blogs which allow links in the comments section that are crawl-able by the search engines (these blogs are commonly identified as Do-Follow Blogs). If you’re not very good at writing content for blog posts, hire a guest blogger for your blog and ask him/her to write precise and unique content so that your blog can gain more credit from a search engine point of view. Never become a part of black hat method.

SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

Social Bookmarking is yet another powerful way of promoting your website, but nowadays most people are spamming social bookmarking sites without knowing how to use them. Social bookmarking is a way to bookmark our favorite web pages online to read them anytime and anywhere if we are connected with the internet.

Do some social bookmarking in popular bookmarking sites like Delicious, StumbleUpon, Propeller, etc. You should be very careful while doing this and you must properly handle the tags which are very essential to broadcast your news on a wide area network. The web pages we bookmarked at social bookmarking sites is considered as a quality back link in the eyes of search engines. This may increase your website traffic based on how effectively you have participated.

PHOTO SHARING

Publish/share your website product pictures and make them public. Let your friends see them and comment on them too, which will help drive traffic towards your website. Do this in major photo sharing websites like Flickr, Picasa, Photo Bucket, etc.

VIDEO PROMOTIONS

Like with photo sharing, you can publish/share your product videos, expert opinions, and reviews of your product and make them public in YouTube, Metacafe, Dailymotion, etc.

LOCAL LISTINGS & YELLOW PAGES

Instead of going global and facing huge competition, make your website local so that search engines can easily view your website and fetch the content. This will help you to reach a targeted audience. Submit your website to Google Local, Maps, Yahoo Local, Yellow Pages, Super pages, Hotfrog, etc.

Now we can conclude like this,

Off page SEO is as important as on-page SEO. If you want your SEO campaigns to be successful you have to do both. When thinking about link building don’t take the easy way, try hard to get links from authorized sites. The more difficult is to get a link, the more value it has. In the past you could easily get thousands of links and rank higher but nowadays you have to do more than that. Because getting so many links from irrelevant sites may cause your site banned from search engines. Making a great website using all your efforts through white hat method and promote it in correct way. Quality Links follows you without any black hat method.

Here I discuss only some off page seo methods. You can give your suggestions and methods here. Am waiting..